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Unlike his father, the 34-year-old Kim has been active in pursuing pro-market economic growth and may be aiming to emulate Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s reforms in the late 1970s. Kim’s recent sacking of three senior old-guard military officials may hint that he is ready to offer some important concessions to prepare a favorable diplomatic environment for concentrating on economic development.

In the past 25 years all manufacturing and investment into Mexico and Canada has been reliant on their position to exploit the NAFTA loophole; the backdoor access to the U.S. market. If Trump shuts down that loophole, and brings the manufacturing and assembly back to the U.S., investment North and South of the U.S. border will drop exponentially and the Canadian and Mexican economies will likely shrink rapidly.

We live in interesting times.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2018 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Current Events, Korea, Trump.
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It seems clear to me that this summit never would have been announced, let alone be taking place, unless serious deals had already been agreed to several months ago, if not longer. The media and political establishments braying otherwise can be safely ignored.

You know the idiotic storyline that’s been put out there for decades, that China needs to step up and muzzle North Korea in order for there to be peace? Plenty of us always said that China had zero interest in doing so, because it was in their interest for NK to be what it is, both to occupy the time and energy of foreign diplomats, and also to serve as a distraction from China’s disgusting record–at least they’re not as bad as North Korea!

So, what would happen if North Korea had a leader who had actually lived in the West and wanted to turn them into a sane country? Would China let that happen? Highly doubtful. It would take some very careful maneuvering to get anything like that done, and the US would have to be willing to help in clever and covert ways to make sure anyone who wanted to do something like that was protected. China’s not going to want their client to be free, but the Koreans are a proud people.

Remember Trump has not been a successful “negotiator” since he was a young man. His best efforts were fighting with his lenders, partners and suppliers. This looks extra familiar today. So we pick fights with Canada and the UK, cuddle up to Putin, go without a plan to meet Kim with no clear objective but to make the President feel in charge. To this time he could do well simply by backing out of all of President Obama’s “stroke of a pen” deals. Now he’s got to do his own and that will take effort.

I’m sorry but thinking of pardoning a really crooked Illinois governor because he was once on the “Apprentice” is not a great thinker at work.

The death of NAFTA is way overdue, and that is strictly down to Canadian and Mexican cheating. The agreement was never meant to enable back-door export of dumped materials and products, but that’s what it’s become–A means for non-NAFTA states to sneak in products. Go look at the hundreds of acres of aluminum ingots stockpiled in Mexico, or the warehouses full of Chinese steel up in Canada, all of which they’ve basically allowed in as duty-free.

Canada and Mexico have nobody to blame but themselves, for not policing this crap. NAFTA was meant to benefit North American trade, not serve as a workaround for avoiding US trade regulation.

If there are impoverished Canadian or Mexican citizens, they have nobody to blame but their own greedy oligarchs who enabled all of this. It is far past the point where the US should have taken action.

CR: Yes, I know. One theory is that KJU wants to normalize NK, since he has seen the West first hand, but he (and perhaps other Kims) is basically a ChiCom hostage/puppet. Wresting him away from them would be quite the accomplishment.

We’ll probably never know, any more than we’ll know whether Rods from God imploded that mountain, or why that sub flew the Jolly Roger on its return to port…

And isn’t Canada and their boy PM just ripe for pissing off, considering that they don’t spend even half of what they agreed to on defense? Although they’re not nearly as cheap as the fat, navel-gazing Germans in that respect. Angela looked like some STASI interrogator grilling Trump on tariffs. You can take the girl out of East Germany, but you can’t take the GDR out of the girl. Fortunately, PDT seemed to blow off her hysterics.

I spend most of my time laughing at the madness in progress. I’ll stop long enough to point out your largest trade partner, Canada is set to apply tit for tat tariffs, to match any US tariffs.

I’m not sure any winners will result from this, but much stupidity is bound to. We like our supply regulated milk, and kinda hate your factory farm surplus looking for a place to go. Hell many of us even understand what this means. ;)

The result unless this is pretty short term is that China will just take the oil you take and probably most of our wood too. They are into hoovering up resources and our largely resource based national economy has little to fear as our stuff can be shipped anywhere. Some caution is certainly appropriate when dealing with our future lords and masters, but we are used to you, don’t forget. ;)

It would be very cool for Trump and Kim to come up with a plan. I guess we’ll see.

The Dakota Access Pipeline that transports oil from North Dakota has been operational for a year. This has more to do with the urgency surrounding the Trans Mountain Pipeline than any jabbering over tariffs.

There are now 34 states that have some sort of oil fracking going on. If not for the transportation and refinery bottlenecks, the United States would never be importing oil. As the economics catch up with the technology, social acceptance increases, and operations become decentralized we can expect a future of energy independence.

Several years ago when the Dakota Access Pipeline was being held up Canada said they’d just start selling their oil straight to China.
We built it, and now they say they’ll start selling their stuff to China if we impose new tariffs on some of their stuff in response to other tariffs they put on some of our stuff (isn’t “free trade” grand?)
Go ahead, Canada. Do what you need to do. So will the USA. It will work out better this way.

Pen, your Security Intelligence Service put together a nice report in an effort to keep Canada from becoming vassal state of the PRC, as New Zealand has become:

• Whether a Chinese partner company is a state-owned enterprise or a private one, it will have close and increasingly explicit ties to the CCP.
• Unless trade agreements are carefully vetted for national security implications, Beijing will use its commercial position to gain access to businesses, technologies and infrastructure that can be exploited for intelligence objectives, or to potentially compromise a partner’s security.
• China is prepared to use threats and enticements to bring business and political elites to its side, and motivate them to defend the Chinese perspective on disputes such as the status of Taiwan and the South China Sea.
• Beijing works actively to inﬂuence ethnic Chinese groups, Chinese students and ethnic Chinese businesses in other countries, often curtailing their freedom of expression to promote a narrative favourable to its views. It has also often purchased control of local Chinese-language news outlets.
• Academics and reporters who question Chinese activities are harassed by Chinese diplomats and Chinese-controlled media.

It was an epic struggle lasting decades. Trump bargained, partnered, cajoled, negotiated, threatened, battled, reconciled, u-turned, bargained again, battled again, u-turned again, partnered again. He managed to turn it into a 20,000% return on his investment. If that’s what luck is then it’s no wonder luck is so rare.

The mistake the article pins on Trump was a 2005 lawsuit he filed that ended up driving up the price for the eventual sale in 2007. Some mistake. One of probably a hundred strategic lawsuits Trump was involved with during the lifetime of this project.

And in the end, thousands of jobs were created, millions of square feet were developed, and billions of dollars were earned. This odyssey was the template for everything you need to know about what Trump’s eight years as president will be like.

And Kim gets his way. ;) All he has asked for, to stop his nuclear efforts, is for you to stop the exercises. Done deal.

You will find, as many have, that fracking is not the same as an oil well. You have to wreck the area and its a gone pretty quick. We have just as horrible a solution in the oil sands but its sustainable.

As for dealing with someone other that America, not a few of our politicians have stated, that we have never got a decent deal on anything we have ever negotiated with the USA. We could hardly do worse.

CR, looks just like the fracking pads around Karnes County, only without mountains in the background. Just a small concrete pad, with some pipes and tanks sticking up. Hardly “wreck the area” and making it “gone pretty quick”.

I do understand fracking has taken on a religious patina, due to its miraculous, ‘we have more oil than we need’ properties and has become an article of faith among the flock.

It has destroyed more than a few water tables and videos of people lighting their water on fire abound. As with everything there are areas that are perfect for fracking and will produce for a long time. YMMV as always.

As a resident of British Columbia and opposed to the Kinder Morgan pipeline I have no wish to ship our climate crime anywhere. As its already a serious mess, why not just build refineries there and ship less, finished product, to market?

I would actually like to know what drives this need to ship crude, when it could be refined at the source. I have not found a useful answer so far.

“It has destroyed more than a few water tables and videos of people lighting their water on fire abound.”
Those very few examples are due to well drilling problems near the surface, not due to fracking. Fracking involves breaking up rock structures several miles below the surface, far, far below the water table.

The ‘gone pretty quick’ is probably referring to production decline rates. It had been observed in years past that fracked wells would produce at at good clip followed by a quick drop-off after the first few years. Then at year five or six, it leveled off to a gradual decline.

New technology is now causing the decline rates to decline, by as much as half in some places

Those very few examples are due to well drilling problems near the surface, not due to fracking. Fracking involves breaking up rock structures several miles below the surface, far, far below the water table.

Don’t tell Penny. He was promised no math.

His story of his various enterprises, from garbage truck driver, to programmer, are all in doubt due to his weaknesses in understanding technology.

I would actually like to know what drives this need to ship crude, when it could be refined at the source. I have not found a useful answer so far.

According to a six-year-old HuffPo article:

Since the 1970s, the number of refineries in Canada has plummeted from 40 to 19, taking a big bite out of the direct refinery labour force, which dropped from 27,400 to 17,500 between 1989 and 2009. There hasn’t been a new refinery built in Canada since 1984, or in the U.S. since 1976…

According to most analysts, the financials have been — and continue to be — the most significant barrier to significantly expanding Canada’s refining capacity. Though the precise cost of a new facility is difficult to pinpoint, some put the initial capital outlay at more than $10 billion.

The refining business is also considered to be more risky than upstream oil production, because profitability is directly impacted by swings in global oil prices and demand for refined products such as gasoline. In recent years, toughening environmental standards and the increasing availability of oil sands bitumen (as opposed to sweet crude, which is no longer as easy to come by), has presented an added challenge, as processing heavier oil is more expensive.

But that hasn’t stopped companies south of the border, where facilities in several dedicated refining areas have undergone major infrastructure upgrades, a process that is still underway, with multi-billion-dollar projects currently in the works in Michigan and Illinois.

According to Michal Moore, a professor at the University of Calgary’s Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy, these upgrades have armed U.S. facilities with the necessary processing and pipeline infrastructure to essentially corner the market in North America.

“The time to make the decision [to build up Canada’s refining industry] was probably 20 years ago, maybe a little before that,” he said. “When you didn’t make that decision, you lost your ability to compete in that market. You couldn’t catch up.”
Why Aren’t We Building Refineries In Canada? Because It’s Too Late, Experts Say, May 2012

I understand refineries are expensive. My question is: Why is oil shipped to refineries rather than having it refined at the source and shipping less total stuff to market? It would seem that would be more efficient and cheaper.

As one who does not want Canada’s rather awful diluted bitumen, shipped through an area that is both narrow and right in the middle of where many of us live, I would like to know. Any discharge will be extremely hard to deal with as it will be solid tar at water temperatures.

We could ship from Alberta, gasoline and fuel oil, to all the markets served by Alberta now and sell it abroad. Why does this not make sense?

“My question is: Why is oil shipped to refineries rather than having it refined at the source and shipping less total stuff to market? It would seem that would be more efficient and cheaper.”

One barrel of crude yields more than one barrel of refined products. The term used to describe this is ‘swell’. When I worked in some of the refineries around Port Arthur, the number bandied about was 7%. As most crude is ‘heavier’ than the bulk of the products produced from it,
the heavier streams from the crude distillation tower is cracked and hydrotreated, to ‘lighten’ it.

If a refinery were locally sited to process the Athabasca oil sands, rather than one pipeline out for crude, you would be looking at multiple
pipelines for the majority of the pumpable products, plus truck haulage for the smaller volume products like lube oil stock, tar & what not.
Given the total reserves around Fort McMurry, local refining might well pay, but it doesn’t seem to be in the cards for Alberta.

Though Canada enjoys broadly free trade with the United States through the North American Free Trade Agreement, it has never been absolute, and the deal makes several concessions to Canadian protectionism and politics. Chief among them are Canada’s extraordinarily high tariffs on American dairy products, which at last week’s Group of Seven summit in Quebec, Trump correctly identified as a “270% tariff.” As the CBC reminded, “Canada levies a tariff of 270 percent on milk, 245 percent on cheese and 298 percent on butter in an effort to keep U.S. and other foreign dairy imports out.” These tariffs exist almost exclusively for the benefit of the agriculture sector of Quebec, a province with a unique stranglehold on Canadian politics.

}}} It has destroyed more than a few water tables and videos of people lighting their water on fire abound.

Aaaand now we know we’re talking to a clueless parrot reading from the script of Gasland.

Except the director of Gasland is ON FILM acking that the “message” is mote important than the facts, the areas he filmed “ignitable water faucets” in were all KNOWN a decade and more before fracking commenced to have this issue, and, as people above have noted, fracking consistently takes place a mile or two UNDER the water tables — separated, usually, by multiple strata of impermeable rock…

Other than THAT, nothing he says is correct, either, mind you. But he scores a ‘A’ grade as an idiot parrot.

Wasted water isn’t dumped. The verb, dump, implies that the waste is just tossed on the ground. Currently, waste water is injected deep below the ground under approval and regulation of the EPA since 1974.